Also commonly referred to as search engine optimisation, SEO is a technique that simply means you're making an effort to understand the ways in which search engines like Google analyse documents on the web for the purposes of displaying helpful, relevant content to visitors. Over the years, Google has continued to tweak its own algorithm to better match the results being displayed with the original intent of the searcher. It also relies on websites to do the same - which is absolutely something that you can leverage to your advantage.

Why SEO Matters

One of the most important things to understand about the effectiveness of SEO is that the vast majority of all online experiences between a brand and its customers still begin with a search engine like Google. Therefore, the better you understand what Google is looking for when it displays its search engine results pages (SERPs), you increase the chances that you'll rank higher when people go looking for products and services like yours.

Keywords play an important role in this - meaning those terms that people are typing into an engine like Google in the first place. You'll want to make sure that your website is using keywords that are not only relevant, but that give you a competitive advantage as well. Not only do certain keywords have higher search volumes than others, but they can also help affiliates grab valuable visibility and possibly convert their visitors as well.

All told, the algorithm on a site like Google will contextualise the relevancy of the content it holds to the search a user makes - effectively ranking those results based on mathematical relationships and machine learning. Each time a user enters a text-based search, a list of pages will be produced based on the relevancy of those terms as they relate to the content the search engine holds.

A lot of people don't realise that Google is actually looking for several hundred signals to determine whether or not something is relevant to a searcher's intent - each one being weighted differently depending on additional factors like the location of the searcher, the search history of that person or even trust signals such as the address on the website.

How to Leverage SEO

Technical SEO will be a big contributor to your overall success. Elements include canonicalisation (meaning choosing one URL as a preferred URL, even when other versions are possible), site architecture and even site speed. Content optimisation is also critical, and expertise, authority and trustworthiness are the three core metrics that Google uses to measure whether content is optimised. 

Finally, there's link building - meaning all those other sites on the Internet that include organic links back to your own content. The best links are not paid for or exchanged - instead, they are earned or given by choice. Writing valuable, high quality content is a great way to generate as many links as possible.

All told, the vast majority of all traffic on a site like Google will go to not only the results on the first page, but the top three to five links in the SERPS - so the higher you rank, the better.